Starbucked by Taylor Clark A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture

STARBUCKED will be the first book to explore the incredible rise of the Starbucks Corporation and the caffeine-crazy culture that fueled its success. Part Fast Food Nation, part Bobos in Paradise, STARBUCKED combines investigative heft with witty cultural observation in telling the story of how the coffeehouse movement changed our everyday lives, from our evolving neighborhoods and workplaces to the ways we shop, socialize, and self-medicate.

In STARBUCKED, Taylor Clark provides an objective, meticulously reported look at the volatile issues like gentrification and fair trade that distress activists and coffee zealots alike. Through a cast of characters that includes coffee-wild hippies, business sharks, slackers, Hollywood trendsetters and more, STARBUCKED explores how America transformed into a nation of coffee gourmets in only a few years, how Starbucks manipulates psyches and social habits to snare loyal customers, and why many of the things we think we know about the coffee commodity chain are false.

The New York Times

But then Clark tells us that Ernesto Illy, patriarch of Italy’s Illycaffè, “the most quality-focused major roaster in the world,” says coffee as dark as Starbucks’s smells as if it’s been through “a fire that has been extinguished by a fire brigade.” After that, Clark discusses rumors that Starbu...

The New York Times

Clark points out it couldn’t if it wanted to: “Despite its perceived ubiquity, it only buys a little over 2 percent of the world’s coffee.”
Is “Fair Trade” coffee rather than Starbucks coffee the answer to the third-world coffee growers’ plight?

Monsters and Critics

Clark also examines the valid concerns about the Walmart Effect that tends to follow the intrusion of big chains such as Starbucks into small communities along with how it deals with coffee producers, its staff of baristas and the effect such a homogenized approach can have on global diversity.

Book Geeks

The now famous (in business circles at least) Howard Shultz was a travelling salesman who noticed an upturn in espresso machine sales and so latched onto this trend, doing some research along the way over in Italy, where they actually know how to make strong coffee well, and opened up his first c...

http://www.citypaper.com

And while Schultz and his minions have absorbed any number of tiny coffeehouse chains in the process, Starbucks also has so boosted customers' appetites for caffeine that some mom-and-pop shops have experienced considerable sales boosts.